Room Upstairs

by Monica Dickens

  Sybil had the percolator going when they returned, and the coffee cups set out, with the cream and sugar. If Dorothy had said they wanted tea, or taken over the hospitality, it would have hurt. But why should it hurt that she thanked Sybil extravagantly and praised her, and called Mrs Outboard’s attention to the pretty traycloth she had chosen?

  ‘That lacquer tray’s a nice piece,’ the sister said, writhing her lips in her life’s perpetual struggle to get them over her teeth. ‘You’ve got a lot of fine old things here, Mrs Prince.’

  ‘Why, thank you.’ Sybil was pleased with her. She took her all over the house, showing her its small rarities and treasures; but after supper, when she suggested staying overnight, as it was getting late, the sister looked alarmed, and left hastily for Cape Cod.

  ‘Did I say something wrong, Dot?’

  Dorothy laughed, riding the bird on her stubby finger, wiggling the nail for him to nibble. ‘She doesn’t like old houses.’

  ‘But she was so interested in seeing everything!’

  ‘You made it rather difficult for her not to be.’

  The bird began a long insane monologue about paper boy and where’s the money and come on Sybil, and Dorothy began to chatter back at him. To keep herself from apologizing in her own home - for something she had npt done! -Sybil went away to telephone Laurie and Jess. They were out. After a while, she still knew that she felt badly, but she could not remember why.

  *

  Dorothy went back to the Pilgrim village again, to look at the herb gardens and talk to the lady dressed as a Settler who had an exhibit of pill-rolling and do-it-yourself medicine, which had greatly taken her fancy.

  Montgomery still came to see Sybil, but he never got a meal during she week. By some coincidence, it was always the day they were having boned eggs, or there were just two chops for dinner. He often came when Laurie and Jess were there, but that was different. Dorothy was jovial and lavish with him then, as if she thought he should stick to his doctoring all week and only be a real person on Sundays.

  Her distrust of the medical profession extended to drug stores and patent medicines. She went Tshah! at the television commercials about the man who wouldn’t buy his kids a puppy because he had a sour stomach, and she had a running feud with the druggist who had sold her a bottle of useless elixir when her cough threatened to strangle her, and had given her short measure on a bottle of a hundred aspirin tablets for Sybil. Dorothy had counted than and there were only ninety-eight.

  But soon she would be able to thumb her nose at all such quackery. It was not that her cigarette cough was any milder or that the pin in Sybil’s femur had stopped aching. But she was on to something better.

  Waxing up with her usual furious energy the carved panelling in the alcove where Sybil’s father used to sit and ponder cross-pollination, she had touched off the secret cupboard which Sybil had forgotten, and found John Camden’s notes on herbal remeshes.

  ‘You don’t mind?’ Dorothy asked, after she had already had them spread out on the front room carpet all afternoon, kneeling over them like a grazing Welsh pony.

  It gave Sybil quite a shock to see her father’s tidy writing, the ink still very black, the footnotes precise. ‘Linctus=a substance to be licked up.’ ‘No hist: evidence of efficacy of Shep: Purse in Haematemesis.’

  Here were the notes he had prepared for his great lecture to the Rhode Island Horticultural Institute, which they had reprinted in their journal. Here were the directions for the concoction of wild parsnips and bilberries which he and Sybil had once tried on a coughing cow.

  Laurie and Jess had done a lot of work in the herb garden on the hill, and saved quite a few of the plants. Many of Theo Prince’s metal labels were still in place in the geometrical plots. When warmer days came, and the cars bore down more heavily each weekend to the sea, Dorothy bought gardening gloves, and a pair of shoes which looked like boxes on her short feet, and spent most of her spare time up in the famous Camden herb garden, weeding and dividing and transplanting, and settling in new plants she ordered from a nurseryman in Connecticut.

  ‘We shall make our own remeshes.’

  ‘Like Indian women,’ Sybil said.

  ‘Like Pilgrim maids.’ No one, mercifully not Anna Romiza, guessed the immensity of Dorothy’s colour prejudice.

  In the old wooden seed house, where Sybil’s stepsisters had measured out seed for the packets in silver spoons, Dorothy scrubbed out some of the slatted drying shelves and laid about the lairs of ancient spiders with a balding corn broom.

  Talking and thinking about the old times of seeds and herbs and all the land busy with sweet grass and plants and little fir trees in military rows, reminded Sybil of what was in the cellar. She remembered it when Dorothy was outside, but she must do something about it before she forgot. Dorothy was too far off to call, and she always pretended not to hear the brass ship’s bell outside the back door, since the time Sybil called her in for something vital and had forgotten it by the time she had plodded down through the cows.

  The cellar stairs were steep and had no handrail. Just the steps on the other side of the door in the kitchen, going down into the middle of the earthy cellar, where brooded the great rainwater cistern, which once held all the water supply. Empty now, everyone hoped, although nobody had lifted the heavy wooden lid for years.

  Impossible for Sybil, even with her cane, so she dropped a cushion on the top step, lowered herself to sit on it, and propelled herself down with her hands, like a child on a tea-tray.

  When Dorothy came in, earth under her nails, sweating, agricultural, Sybil was slumped at the kitchen table with a shot of brandy, under verbal fire from the bird, who liked to see people busy.

  ‘All right there, lady?’ Dorothy narrowed her eyes at the brandy. She once knew a woman who was an alcoholic, and could cap any tale about Melia.

  Sybil nodded. ‘Look what I found for you.’ Cobwebby on the draining-board, for her strength had not extended to washing them, were the pestle and mortar, the corrugated pill board and roller, the earthenware jar and pewter pan - all Papa’s old equipment with which he had tried out Will Camden’s herbal lore.

  ‘Oh clever Sybilla!’ And Sybil glowed like a schoolgirl and forgot her exhaustion and her fear that she had done her heart in at last. Dorothy was always saying: You can stretch a heart just so far, and Sybil saw it like an overtaxed fiddle string, snapping - doing-g-g! and that would be the end.

  She had forgotten most of what her father showed her, for she had only been a child, playing in her mother’s pinafore, but it would come back. She and Dot would be Pilgrim maids together, and make simples and salves and electuaries. Idea! They would use Priscilla, said Dorothy.

  Yes, they would use Priscilla. She was Marma’s cooking stove. But it was not Marma, it was Papa who was so very close in the kitchen. Wait for me, Papa - The Lord created medicines out of the earth, he said, in his gentle instructive voice, and he that is wise will not abhor them.

  Seven

  For the Fourth of July holiday, the house was full again.

  ‘We’ll see,’ was Dorothy’s disturbing reply when Jess said: ‘I hope it’s not too much for you.’

  What if it was? What would they see then? Someone had opened a new nursing home outside the town, low and streamlined as a luxury motel, with a few old folk out in wicker chairs on the tiny lawn, like stage props.

  ‘That looks quite nice,’ Jess said brightly, driving Sybil to the library. But the grandmother had stiffly turned her head the other way and would not look.

  Laurie had brought his friend Peter, who was to crew for him in the sailboat races. Sybil’s younger daughter Mary had come from Camden, collecting Uncle Ted from the New York club where he lived with several other shuffling old men who were much happier than anyone believed.

  ‘Why can’t I crew for you?’ Jess asked Laurie. She had sailed with him last year, and every weekend of this summer, though she had not expected that. She had counted on being preg
nant by now, but she wasn’t, so why be left at home as if she was?

  ‘Darling, I’m planning on a few wins.’ He laughed and kissed her, and Peter laughed his unamused Princetonian neigh. She wished they had not brought him. He was a eunuch, not even a queer, but he liked Laurie’s company without her.

  They went to the boat dock and then to the beach to swim, without coming back for her. ‘If I’d wanted the kind of man who went off with the boys all the time, I’d have married an Englishman,’ she said.

  Laurie laughed again, pulling a shirt over his head, and pushed her backwards on to the bed and fell on her, his shirt still over his face.

  ‘Excuse me’ Dorothy said at the door. ‘But your grandmother wants to know who is going to meet Mr Camden and Miss Prince.’

  Laurie swore, and Dorothy said: ‘Tut, tut, Loll’ (no one ever called him Loll). ‘I’ll have to wash your mouth out with soap.’

  It was not only that she always came into rooms without knocking, or that she had a gift for intruding on people in love, in the garden, or behind a door, or wherever they happened to be. It was her attitude of innocent unconcern, as if they were children in the bath.

  Jess had met Aunt Mary briefly at her wedding, a colourless, nearsighted woman, with the figure of a flat girl in the wrong kind of clothes, and fine nut-brown hair in a juvenile cut.

  At the wedding, she had worn a dress like a Girl Scout uniform, but she had been the only one who did not seem to be adding Jess up and thinking: What’s so special about her that Laurie wouldn’t have chosen an American girl?

  When Jess had rent the night with her screams and sobs, Mary had not crowded round her asking questions she could not answer. But she had said next day, when the others were commiserating with her swollen, shadowed eyes: ‘She looks all right to me.’

  The family knew her as poor Mary, and she had adopted the buffoon’s defence of deriding herself before they could. Trust me to make a hash of it. Missed the bus again. Not me, I’ll crack the camera.

  Sybil was impatient with her, thumping the cane which had become so much another limb to her that it was hard to remember what she had gestured with before. Uncle Ted moved his garden chair behind a bush so that Mary could not disturb him with chatter, and Dorothy practically threw her out of the kitchen, for: she would drive you mad fiddling, and asking what to do next.

  Jess took her down to the yacht club to see the races, and she watched the wrong boat all the way and cried out: ‘Bravo, Laurie!’ when somebody else won.

  It was boring. ‘Do you want to swim?’ But Mary had not swum since she was a girl. Her ears. The late afternoon was cooling when they got back to the house, and Mary said, with a naive enthusiasm for anything that was something to do: ‘Let’s take a walk. It will stimulate my appetite.’

  She ate so much already that Uncle Ted had asked her last night whether she had worms; but Jess agreed, and was surprised to find herself thinking: And Laurie will come home with Peter, wanting to tell me about the races, and he won’t know where I am.

  Barefoot, in shorts, with Mary in a cotton dress three seasons too long, and rimless dark glasses clipped over her powerful spectacles, they walked together amicably over the cropped turf and through the long dry patches the cows rejected to see what Dorothy had done in the garden of Mary’s father and grandfather.

  ‘That thyme will never thrive there.’ Mary did not know much about horticulture, but she had an eye for what would fail.

  She sat down on a tumbling low stone wal - you could never imagine her as a child, sprawling on grass - while Jess pushed a vine into place on the lattice that she and Laurie had repaired last year. Dorothy had worked, but only in the herb plot. The little bushes of potentilla, that Laurie and Jess had saved to flower again in papery yellow, were half strangled with crab grass. When this place is ours … But it was the first time she had been up here without Laurie, and if he didn’t care, it might as well be left to Dorothy and the crab grass.

  The seedhouse, leaning a little on its rotting timbers, was still very warm, although the sun was gone from the cracked windows and the skylight. There was a dusty incense of old earth in flower pots, and the leaves and roots and seeds that Dorothy had laid out to dry.

  ‘They’re going to make herbal remeshes.’

  ‘Do more harm than good, I expect,’ Mary said. ‘I remember once when I had a cold that went to my sinuses, the way my dumb old colds always do, Mother brewed me some kind of privet tea her father used to make, and I threw up all over the stair carpet. I was always throwing up. “Thar she blows”, John used to say.’

  She had been a weakly child, always ill to spoil a journey or a treat, sick with excitement before every Boston theatre trip, frantic with nightmares for three years until they found her adenoids had grown again.

  She had even been afraid of the harmless, dusty seedhouse. ‘Thelma locked me in here once,’ she told Jess, ‘and when they found me, I couldn’t speak for an hour.’

  ‘Why didn’t you break a window?’

  ‘I didn’t think of it. I was such a dope. The little kids in my room at school have far more sense than I ever had.’

  Jess yawned. A lassitude had been creeping over her during the day, weighing her down like coming thunder. It was the same feeling as after her rare fights with Laurie, when she almost dislocated her jaw yawning and yawning; but they had not fought today. The friction over Petar was still half a joke.

  ‘I’m boring you,’ Mary said, without surprise. ‘Let’s go down.’

  At the bottom of the sloping pasture, they pushed through the heavy curtain of leaves and stood inside the cool secret tent of the weeping beech. The lower branches, flat and grey like the necks of the prehistoric animals that once roamed here, bent down so heavily to the earth that some of them had rooted there and risen beyond in a sea-serpent curve to bury themselves again, leaves rotting in the turf, far away from the trunk.

  Mary’s name was carved on the smooth bark, shaky and shallow, where the other family names were deep and bold. The day that Jew was first so happy here, they had run out of the cow tunnel to the tree, and Jess had cut her name in beside Laurie’s boyhood carving, and they had marked out a box below, for the names of their children.

  ‘I used to come here when I was a child,’ Mary said, ‘and sit on the branches and pretend it was a horse, because I was too scared to ride the pony. We had this maid then, Polly was her name, she’d lived all her life around here, and she used to tell me the old legends of the town about the poisoned house, and the knocking on the bricked-up doorway, and the old man who was condemned to wander till the crack of doom. The others wouldn’t listen to her, but I always listened. She told me these branches had the souls of animals and would scream if you cut too far into them. That’s why I—’ She ran a finger over the feebly scratched letters of her name. ‘You think I was as crazy as she was, I’ll bet.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it now?’

  ‘Well I - I hadn’t thought. The weeping tree has gone, anyway.’

  ‘Tell me.’ If Jess had had a Polly, what would there have been to shiver about in the long afternoons of childhood? In the suburban road of cheap identical houses in narrow plots of land like piano keys, there were no skeletons to knock in coal sheds, no ancients wandering eternally in nothing but a beard.

  ‘Charity and John. They were twin oak trees my grandfather planted on either side of the driveway when he came here with his first wife. But my grandmother Bella, his second wife, was always jealous of Charity, so after he shed, she did something to the Charity tree, cut into it with an axe or something, and Polly said that ever after, it would weep at the new moon.’

  ‘Did it?’

  Mary had undipped the dark glasses. Her eyes were small and expressionless behind the thick lenses of her spectacles. She nodded. ‘I saw it.’

  ‘You saw it?’ This was different from hearing about Polly’s tales. It was cold in the sunless temple of the tree. Above, the leaves were a rich green
fountain above the oaks, but down here they never got the sun, and they were pale and still, like under water.

  ‘I went out one night after everyone was asleep. I can’t think how, for I was always nervous at night. I used to pay Thelma half my allowance to let me sleep with her. Sometimes she took the money, and then locked her door. I went down to the tree. The moon was a finger nail. It was dark. I couldn’t see it. I felt it. It was bleeding like a wound. But when I got indoors and looked at my hand, it was dry.’

  Dorothy began to ring the ship’s bell like a wild woman for Jess to come and help her, but Jess and Mary pushed out through the curtain of branches on the other side of the tree, so she would not see them, and Mary showed Jess where the Charity tree had stood, near the end of the cow tunnel.

  Above, the traffic flashed through the setting sun like an endless train, the noise of each car a part of the whole. ‘It must have been terrible when you found out where they were going to put the road.’

  ‘I never really liked this place,’ Mary said, ‘so it wasn’t so bad for me. It about killed Mother. They’d been talking about by-passing the town for years, but no one dreamed - well, who would, when there’s so much scrubland all around? I remember the day, I’ll never forget it. Mother was in the front room, and she suddenly screamed out. I ran in. I thought she was ill. She was standing by the window like a statue, and there were men walking through our meadow, knocking in stakes. Walking through. Just like that. They crossed the driveway and one of them put down his mallet and leaned against the Charity tree to light a cigarette. He looked towards the house and saw us watching, and he waved. Waved! I thought Mother would have a fit.’

  The bell rang again, as if the place was on fire, and they turned towards the house.